We are students in Northwestern's Medill IMC [Integrated Marketing Communications] program in a Direct and Integrated Marketing course that teaches social marketing. As a part of our assignments, we need to better establish our professional personas and begin writing blogs on key topics which concern our future professional industries. You can also follow us on twitter using the hash tag #NUSocialIMC. Enjoy!

Monday, November 19, 2012

Luxury department store Barneys New York
has recently partnered with The Walt Disney Company to roll out its annual
holiday campaign – Electric Holiday. The
campaign combines Disney’s creativity and storytelling with high fashion to create
a unique customer experience. To further engage its customers with this holiday
project, Barneys held a mobile scavenger hunt for gift cards. Participants
would only be able to find the “Mickey Messenger” by following the clues on
Barneys’ Twitter and Instagram.

Source: http://bit.ly/102D5E9

Barneys certainly is not the first luxury
brand to run social media promotions. The demand for promotions does exist,
according to an Ad Age/Ipsos Observer survey. But what are the things luxury
marketers need to do in order to get the most out of social media promotions?

1.Definewhat success looks like. This might sound too obvious to mention,
but you would be surprised at how often marketers ignore the importance of
defining goals for their social media promotions. The goals could be gaining
Twitter followers, increasing newsletter subscribers, or driving traffic to
your ecommerce site. By understanding what’s at stake and identifying your
objective, the promotion can be better designed to help you accomplish the
goal.

2.Exploitthe power of social sharing. Anyone who sees your promotion has the
capability to spread this information farther within his/her network. Understand
the viral nature of social media could help you execute your promotion in a way
that takes full advantage of the medium. Learn from Barneys’ strategy, which
gave customers an incentive to share the promotion and thus encouraged
engagement.

3.Setmetrics
for evaluation. So, did your promotion work? After figuring out your goal,
you should set key metrics for measuring the results. Make sure you have all
the “before” figures and track the promotion to find out what impact it had on
site traffic, conversion, or brand sentiment.

Though we haven’t seen the results of
Barneys’ holiday scavenger hunt, this social media promotion is a timely
reminder of what other luxury marketers need to keep in mind when crafting a
similar promotion plan.

Phoebe
Chen is a graduate student in Medill’s Integrated Marketing Communications
program at Northwestern University. She specializes in brand/advertising
strategy and marketing analytics and has experience working with multinational
companies operating in various industries. Follow her @yhschen or connect with
her on LinkedIn: Phoebe Chen.